…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis

I know the title of the “The Best…” list is both awkward and a mouthful (and it’s not even entirely accurate). Let me explain…

During the first part of the school year, we focus on writing Problem/Solution and Persuasive essays in our Intermediate English classes. Then we do one on Response To Literature. I already developed The Best Resources For Learning How To Write Response To Literature Essays, which contains a lot of good interactive exercises for that genre. In a moment, I’ll share all my Best lists related to writing. But even though I have quite a few, I really didn’t have one that would be particularly helpful to our upcoming Problem/Solution essay. And when I began trying to find them, I discovered that all the good ones I found were not specifically about Problem/Solution, but instead where about various kinds of related-writing.

So, for lack of a better title, I came up with The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis. I’m all ears if anybody can come up with a better one.

Before I share my choices for this list, here are links to all my other writing-related ones:

Also, instead of describing each of these links, I’m just going to reprint what I have written for our Intermediate English class blog. That’s designed for student self-access. I just don’t have it in me today to do much more than that.

Here are my picks For The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis (as reprinted from our class blog, including instructions):

Try these writing activities and games. If the first ones are too easy, try the next one. Each one gets a little harder.

Five minutes before class ends, please leave a comment saying which activity you liked the best and why:

In addition to these exercises, students will also be reviewing interactive essay examples from Holt’s Elements Of Literature. They really have a good variety of essays that are interactive. Be aware, though, that their site does not appear to be Firefox-friendly.

Related

5 Comments

Perfect – what timing! Getting ready to teach an academic writing class to German college students from different faculties. Do you use a Posterous group blog setup with any of your current classes? I’m trying to decide whether to have the students keep individual blogs or contribute to a collective one. The course is a one-off week with 4 asignments incl. peer review tasks, and it’s the first time I’ll be having them blog. Thanks for this, Larry, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts!

My Newest Book On Student Motivation!

My Second Book On Teaching ELLs

My book, "The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels," (co-authored by Katie Hull Sypnieski) was published in the Summer of 2012